If there’s a more controversial movie coming out this year for the nerd set than the Michael Bay-producedTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you probably don’t want to know about it. And here’s something else you probably don’t want to know about, the trailer description for the new TMNT movie, AKA: “Bay-Turtles.” If you’re holding on for any hope that the stuff you’ve heard about the movie so far is a red herring, sorry, it might be worse than you think. The new trailer was screened at Cinema Con in Las Vegas, the annual convention of theater owners, and, well, no one was amused.

The following description from Badass Digest will do absolutely nothing to quell that sinking feeling that this will be the worst thing since bubonic plague.

At first the trailer hides the turtles – there’s voice over from William Fichtner’s Shredder explaining the city has gone to shit. We see criminals with automatic weapons and buildings exploding and maybe – just maybe! – it seems like this could be a Hobo With A Shotgun version of a city in decline. It turns out that this version of Shredder hates that crime and violence, and so he started a program to create heroes. That’s juxtaposed with TCRI ooze canisters and experiments. You know, the ooze that created the turtles. The ooze that Shredder made… with April’s dad. Yes, the VO is Shredder telling April he and her dad made the turtles. There’s flash footage of the Turtles fighting guys in the subway and April films on her phone. Then the turtles are revealed… and they’re kind of bad? Meredith Woerner of io9 was sitting next to me and said they looked like babies with penis heads, and she’s right. They’re not turtle-y enough and they’re not anthropomorphized enough. They’re a terrible middle ground. They do crack wise, though. We see the turtles sliding down a mountain and one yells “Batter up!” and is thrown into a Hummer, shell first, crushing the door of the vehicle.

So Shredder isn’t entirely evil? April has a dad? “Babies with penis heads?” Well, without seeing the trailer with one’s own eyes you can infer that this is going to suck. But hey, don’t take some guy from Badass Digest’s word for it, you’ll be able to see the trailer for yourself in a couple of days, as it will be posted online sometime Thursday morning.

At the very least we can be grateful that there’s no more alien talk, right? Still, one gets the feeling that like The Amazing Spider-Man the filmmakers are screwing around with the origins for the sake of being “different” and that’s fairly unlikely to end well. The secret origin of April O’Neil? Who gives a carp?! But really, why is he called The Shredder if he’s a mad scientist and not some ninja madman? Why was he mucking about with ooze and creating mutants? How does Michael Bay get such latitude when clearly he can’t be trusted with something as simple as cars turning into robots? Sigh.

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